these install, per the companion CD convention, to /opt/sfw

• SFWsigc++-2.0.17.pkg (1.8MB)
• SFWtorrent-0.12.2.pkg (17MB)
• SFWrtorrent-0.8.2.pkg *(1.8MB)

enjoy..

preed just landed (here, and here) alfred’s last two remaining patches for bug 7800: Songbird would be even more cross-platform with OpenSolaris/Solaris support!

so as of now, OpenSolaris support is a first-class citisen in the Songbird SVN repo. while we won’t be able provide QA coverage, i’m bringing up a machine here with OpenSolaris 2008.05 that i hope to turn into a buildbot so we can at least monitor and know when checkins break the OpenSolaris build.

needless to say, i’m pretty psyched at my two favourite open source projects getting it on.

but what’s really cool is go take a look at bug 7800… i mentioned this at our session at the DevSummit on Sunday: this was a fantastic example of an external contributor working directly via forums and via our Bugzilla, getting code review, updating patches, etc. etc. the list of patches and comments is probably our longest yet actually.

This was my first experience being on a program committee to help select speakers, and I have to say it was fun. It was great to see submissions from so many people I know from the community, and there were definitely some hard selections to be made (I think we had FOUR people submit IPS/packaging proposals!!)

Anyway, glad to see a good mix of some knowledgable Sun folks, as well as some focus on other aspects of OpenSolaris that don’t get enough attention IMHO (Testing & Localisation/Translation).

Plus… boat trip! Seriously! That would be the only conference I’ve ever seen with a boat trip + dinner. I’m jealous I can’t make it.

Anyway, congratulations to all the speakers.

(with many thanks to Jim Grisanzio for his excellent photo-taking skills and camera)

Fortunately, Mossop over on extdev pointed me at Mozilla’s streamConverter services.

Unfortunately there wasn’t much sample code for me to blatantly rip-off^W^W^Wlearn from, so after much bumbling around like the JS amateur that I am, I finally got something working. I’m documenting it here so that hopefully others might find it useful. Or at the very least, I can look it up again when I will inevitably need to do this again

Mossop first pointed out that I wouldn’t be able to use XMLHttpRequest and that I would need to open a channel:

// Get the IO service
var ioService = Cc["@mozilla.org/network/io-service;1"]
        .getService(Ci.nsIIOService);
// Create an nsIURI
var mtUri = ioService.newURI(magnatuneURL, null, null);
// Create a channel from that URI
var chan = ioService.newChannelFromURI(mtUri);

Awesome. The tricky part now is the docs lie. They say there is a gzip to uncompressed stream converter that implements asyncConvertData() and a synchronous convert(). I opt’d for synchronous since it seemed easier to get working off the bat, but kept getting error messages saying it wasn’t implemented. Turns out that’s true. The gzip->uncompressed method only implements asyncConvertData. So now I’d need to define a stream listener (implementing the nsiStreamListener) interface. This is the listener that is invoked for each uncompressed chunk. It needs to implement onStartRequest, onStopRequest, & onDataAvailable where onDataAvailable is passed the uncompressed data:

function StreamListener() {
    this._data = null;
    this._first = true;
}   

StreamListener.prototype = {
    onStartRequest: function(aReq, aContext) {},
    onStopRequest: function(aReq, aContext, aStatusCode) {
        // this._data is my full uncompressed file now, for Magnatune this is my
        // XML file, so now I can go do whatever I want with it.
        Magnatune.Controller.completeSyncWithStore(this._data);
    },  
    onDataAvailable: function(aReq, aContext, aInputStream, aOffset, aCount) {
        var binInputStream = Cc["@mozilla.org/binaryinputstream;1"]
                    .createInstance(Ci.nsIBinaryInputStream);
        binInputStream.setInputStream(aInputStream);
        if (this._first) {
            this._data = binInputStream.readBytes(binInputStream.available());
            this._first = false;
        } else
            this._data += binInputStream.readBytes(binInputStream.available());
        binInputStream.close();
    }
};

So now that I have my channel open, and my stream listener defined - I need to create my nsIStreamConverter service to take the gzip’d data from the channel, and pass it to the stream listener so it can do its thing with the uncompressed data.

// Get the converter service
var converterService = Cc["@mozilla.org/streamConverters;1"]
            .getService(Ci.nsIStreamConverterService);
        
// Instantiate our gzip decompresser converter
var converter = converterService.asyncConvertData("gzip",
            "uncompressed", myListener, null);

So now that we have all our pieces defined, all that’s left to do is pass the converter to the channel and start the pipeline:

// Initiate the asynchronous open.  This will initiate the connection
// to Magnatune, grab the gzip'd data and pass it to our gzip converter
// which will then call the StreamListener, so our completion hook is
// fired in the StreamListener's onStopRequest()
chan.asyncOpen(converter, null);

Awesome. So now every Songbird/Magnatune user will be downloading a 300kb gzip’d file instead of a massive 6MB file each time they sync with the Magnatune DB.

it’s neat. you can browse the 7600+ tracks available at magnatune and play the full length of the song exactly as if it were a local library. right now clicking the “buy this track” button pops up a new browser tab and takes you to the page to enter your info to purchase the MP3 (without the magnatune nag voice at the end of each track that you hear when you play directly from the store)

they have an API for doing purchases directly, but it involves transmitting a credit card number via a URL. ick. i need to test to see if it accepts those variables via POST instead of GET to make it a little more secure. if that works, then this would be pretty neat. if i can get a better integrated purchase experience, then i’ll consider this complete.

update: uploaded the add-on here

I started mucking about with a Songbird add-on last night and got something working a few hours ago that builds an additional “Magnatune” library in Songbird to represent all the tracks available on Magnatune. You can play them directly from the remote track (yay open web!) currently. I plan to add a way to purchase the track so it can be added to the local library as well (which should also allow it to be sync’d after purchase then too). It’s been an interesting challenge… and I’m still running into a few hiccups, I suspect because of the way I now effectively have two local libraries (which shouldn’t be that big a deal since devices, etc. all have their own libraries from Songbird’s perspective).

Anyway, it’s been a fun project so far… and I have to say, there’s something cool about having all 7600+ Magnatune tracks available for direct play within Songbird. I’ll definitely post this to the addons site when I’m done.

I left 7 months ago, while still in my first term on the OGB, and I was re-elected as a community member who does not work for Sun.

I did drink the kool-aid for 4.5 years… but I’d like to think I still think for myself and have independent thoughts.

kthxbai!

many thanks to Mike Linksvayer over at Creative Commons for pointing out to me that Jamendo kicks some serious ass in Songbird.

go check out pornophonique’s 8-bit lagerfeur album. it’s wicked 8-bit gameboy-style rock. my favourite track is “sad robot” (the first track)

About the only good thing I can say about that resume is that the the intro paragraph I read saved me the time of having to read the rest of the resume.